Another interesting part of the museum is the exhibition of fossils, the most prominent of which is the Palaeontological collection of the German Professor Siegfried Ε. Kuss. A big part of this collection had been housed for several years in the Natural History Museum of Karlsruhe in Germany. Recently, after a mutual agreement with the Natural History Museum of Crete, the collection returned to Crete permanently.
The collection consists of 8200 specimens, the majority of which are fossil bones from Crete and other islands of the South Aegean Sea. In addition, the collection includes a significant number of specimens of the Cyprian dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minutus), as well as several bones of the peculiar ruminant Myotragus balearicus from Mallorca, Spain.
Of particular importance are considered the specimens of Miocene age (15-10 million years old) which comprise the oldest terrestrial fossils of Crete (giraffes, rhinoceroses, tortoises, etc.). The Pleistocene (the last 2 million years) material, which constitutes the bulk of the collection, consists mainly of endemic forms of deer from Crete (such as Candiacervus ropalophorus, Candiacervus cretensis etc.), as well as from the Islands of Kasos, Karpathos, Rhodes and Kithira. In addition it contains specimens of endemic small sized elephants (Elephas creutzburgi) and dwarf hippopotamuses (Hipppopotamus creutzburgi) from Crete, tortoise bones (Testudo marginata cretensis) and a plethora of bird and small mammal bones.
Also, we should highlight the fact that this collection contains three unique specimens for science. These specimens are the “holotypes”, the ones on which the determination of the Cretan elephant, Elephas creutzburgi, and two species of deer from Kasos (Candiacervus cerigensis) and Karpathos (Candiacervus pigadiensis), was based for the first time.